John Lutz Bundle (137 page)

Later that day, Terri and Richard were eating lunch at Kazinski’s on the Upper West Side. Terri was picking daintily at a romaine and walnut salad while Richard wolfed down his goulash.

She hadn’t mentioned the hook in the bathroom ceiling. Hadn’t thought it worth mentioning. When she saw the super she’d ask what it was for. Maybe to hang a bicycle by one of its wheels, get it out of the way for when guests came over. Not a bad idea for a tiny Manhattan apartment. Close the shower curtain and no one would ever guess they were sharing a bathroom with a Schwinn.

“I love to order goulash,” Richard Crane said. “You never know what you’re going to get.”

Terri grinned and took a sip of her Chianti. “You obviously approve of that version.”

“Yes. It’s delicious. But maybe that’s because I’m with you.”

How can he always know exactly the right thing to say?

Terri had called Office Tech that morning and told them she wasn’t feeling well. She was out of sick days, so the store manager allowed her to use one of her vacation days and said he hoped she’d feel better.

She’d felt like telling him she’d never felt better in her life, but instead politely closed the lid of her cell phone and continued her walk through the park with Richard Crane.

They’d played all morning, enjoying each other like lovers who’d been separated by life and somehow found each other. Maybe that’s what they were, Terri thought. Maybe Richard was right in saying some things were predestined. Wasn’t the study of genetics making that more and more obvious?

Human beings were so mysterious, Terri thought. So unpredictable. Didn’t that make life wonderful?

Lavern winced as her friend Bess touched a damp washrag to the cut near her left eye. Bess held the washrag out and glanced at the blood, shook her head.

“This is happening more often,” she said. There was anger in her voice.

Lavern could only nod. One of Hobbs’s glancing blows had caught her in her throat, and it was still sore.

“You gotta do something,” Bess said. “Make some kinda move.”

Lavern began to cry. Bess touched the cool washrag to her injured eye again, and both women sat motionless for a while.

“Men,” Bess said, finally. “They’re never what we expect.”

“Neither are we what they expect,” Lavern said hoarsely.

“So everything’s our fault?”

“Only most of the time,” Lavern said.

Bess looked at her. “So you’re goin’ back to that piece of shit again?”

“Yeah. And I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t call him that.”

“Ah, Lavern…”

“Really,” Lavern said, and coughed, choking.

Now Bess began to cry.

Richard forked in some more goulash. “Would you like more bread?” he asked, while pouring her more wine.

She looked up from the topped-off wineglass and smiled. “Are you trying to get me drunk so you can take me home and have wild sex with me?”

“More like relaxed sex.”

“No,” she said.

He frowned.

“On the bread, I mean.”

He grinned and somehow managed to add even more wine to her glass.

After lunch Terri went to the ladies’ room and was surprised when she returned to find Richard holding a brown paper sack. He’d gone to the bar section of Kazinski’s and bought a bottle of wine.

“Chardonnay this time,” he said. “A particularly good vintage.”

“Are you a wine expert?” Terri asked, as they left the restaurant and began walking through the warm afternoon toward a subway stop where a train would carry them south.

“Like everybody else,” Richard said. He was joking, but Terri got the idea that he
did
know about wine. She suspected that Richard knew quite a lot about a number of things but was too polite to parade his knowledge.

“Every now and then,” she said, “your good breeding shows.”

“You object?”

“No. I like it. To most of the single men in Manhattan ‘good breeding’ signifies something else altogether.”

He laughed. “Well, I like to think I know something about that, too.”

“You should write a book,” she said.

“I’d title it
Terri.
”

Once inside her apartment, they drank to that.

“Around the time of the shooting,” Fedderman said to Rosa Pajaro, “you loaded a cart with some clean laundry in the basement and brought it up in an elevator to lobby level.”

“
Sí.
Yes. There is a storage room on this level where extra linens and other supplies are kept.”

“It’s near where Mr. Becker was shot.”

He stared at her expectantly, even though he hadn’t actually asked a question.

She returned his gaze for only a few seconds and then dropped her eyes to stare at the maroon carpet of the Antonian Hotel lobby. They were sitting and talking in what the management called a conversation nook. The maid was a terribly unskilled liar. Fedderman found himself liking her, and thought she must have been extremely attractive a few years and pounds ago. Rosa Pajaro was a woman who showed hard wear.

“Is right,” she said, finally.

“When you rolled your cart toward the storage room, did you notice anyone or anything suspicious in the corridor?”

She shook her head no. “
Solitario.
I was alone with my job.”

He had the impression she might speak English better than she was letting on. But that was a common ploy for illegal aliens, which Rosa Pajaro might very well be. In order to get her job here at the Antonian, she had to have papers, but papers could be forged.

“According to your records,” Fedderman said, “you’ve been working here at the hotel for six years.”

“Yes, that is so. I work hard.”

“So it says here.” The papers Fedderman consulted mentioned nothing of the sort, being a computer printout of directions and a restaurant menu. “You’re rated as an excellent employee. One who would tell the truth.”

“I am saying what is true. There is nothing to tell.” Again she couldn’t meet his eyes. “When this terrible thing happened, I must have been in the storage room.”

“Or it might have happened before you arrived.”

“
Si.
Or even after I left.”

“Did you notice any blood on the carpet near the door to outside?”

“No. Nothing.”

“You’re saying there was no blood?”

“I say only that I didn’t notice any.”

“Was the door to outside closed all the way and locked?”

“I couldn’t say. I didn’t pay attention to the door, only to my work.”

Fedderman stared at her. He knew she was lying, but probably not about anything pertinent. Maybe she’d seen Becker’s body before it was moved and then hightailed away. Or maybe she
had
seen the bloodstain, though on the maroon carpet it wouldn’t have been very noticeable. He could take Rosa Pajaro in and lean on her, make her afraid, even suggest she was a suspect. But she couldn’t be held, and when she got the opportunity she might run. If she was an illegal, so what? Fedderman didn’t want to make trouble for her. There was really no reason to push her, he thought, unless she might be the killer, which was too unlikely to consider.

“I am in trouble?” she asked, alarmed by his thoughtful silence.

Fedderman smiled at her. “Not as long as you’ve told the truth.”

“That’s what I’ve done, I swear.” She crossed herself. Fedderman wasn’t sure, but he thought she might have done it backward.

Wow. Something’s not right.

She knew she was beginning to slouch on the sofa, but she couldn’t seem to make herself sit up straight.

The food, the wine, the walk from the subway stop to her apartment had made Terri Gaddis exhausted. After the third glass of wine, her eyes began involuntarily closing. It felt as if invisible fingers were pushing them shut.

She didn’t want to feel this way. Richard expected some of that wild sex she’d mentioned at lunch. She’d
almost
promised him. He’d certainly be willing, but the wine was having its effect and she was fast losing her desire.

What’s wrong with me? Why do I feel so…

Struggling not to fall asleep, she heard him rise from beside her on the sofa and cross the room, go into the kitchen.

When he returned, he lifted her head and gently placed the rim of a glass against her lips.

“Drink this, sweetheart. It’ll fix you up.”

His voice sounded far, far away. She sipped and was mildly surprised. She tasted the same wine she’d been drinking, one of the reasons she felt so tired.

“S’more chardonnay,” she muttered.

“You say you want more?” he asked, amused.

He’s deliberately misunderstanding.

“Same…” she murmured. She tried to say the word
chardonnay
again, but it was too difficult. Her tongue was getting numb, and there was no feeling in her cheeks. If she tried to touch them, they might not be there. They might be made of wood. She tried again. “Chardonnay.” She heard something slurred and incomprehensible and realized it was her own voice.

Richard answered, she was sure, but she couldn’t understand him as she dropped into a comforting warm darkness.

As she was keying the dead bolt on the door, Pearl heard the phone ringing inside her apartment. Which of course made her hurry and fumble and drop the key on the hall carpet.

By the time she’d opened the door and reached the phone, it had rung at least nine times. Maybe something important.

Too exhausted to be cautious and check caller ID, she took several long steps across the living room and scooped up the receiver.

“Pearl? Is that you, dear?”

Her mother, calling from Sunset Assisted Living in New Jersey. Pearl’s heart took a dive.

“Pearl?”

“Me.”

“It’s your mother, Pearl, calling from Hades.”

Pearl tried at least to keep a civil tone in her voice. “Assisted living isn’t Hades, Mom.”

“So purgatory then. A stop on the way down, just to torture. I’ve been calling and calling, and not even your machine answers anymore.”

Pearl saw that the LED display on her answering machine was signaling that there was no more room for messages. It also indicated that she’d received fifteen messages. She stretched the phone cord so she could sit on the end of the sofa.

“Is something wrong, Mom?”

“I thought you’d never ask. Yes, wrong. I’m concerned, as a good mother should be, about my daughter, which is only natural and is why I’m calling, to find out some pertinent information about it.”

Pearl didn’t like this at all. She was worn down by the gauntlet of conversations she’d run all day with people who couldn’t remember, didn’t recall, didn’t care, might be lying anyway. “What would
it
be, Mom?”

“The thing just behind your ear, dear. That’s what
it
is, and it’s more important than you, in your hectic and solitary life, seem to think.”

“It’s only a mole, Mom.”

“You know this?”

“I’m sure enough of it that I’m not worried.”

“So now you have medical opinions? Are you an actual medical doctor, like Dr. Milton Kahn? No, Pearl, you are not. It’s not your place to examine a mole and just make up a diagnosis, not to mention a prognosis. This is a worry to me and to all who love you, and you should consider that and them.”

“It’s my mole,” Pearl said, feeling at that moment the hopelessness of her position.

“So have you recently checked
your
mole?” her mother asked.

“Recently enough.”

“And is it the same in shape, color, and size? Has it moved at all?”

Moved?
“Everything looks the same, Mom.” Pearl slipped her shoes off her aching feet and wriggled her toes. She wished she could hang up the phone, go into the bedroom, get naked, take a shower, and scrub off the lousy day that she’d spent in the hole in the world left by violent untimely death. If people only knew, if they understood…

“Pearl,” said her mother’s voice on the phone, calling from purgatory, “have you ever looked at a mole under a microscope?”

“No.”

“They are not a pretty sight. And, I might add, it is the consensus of medical experts that you might
think
you’re looking at a mole and be looking at something else very much more dangerous.”

“I’m not dying of mole poisoning, Mom.”

“This is not a venue for humor, Pearl. A doctor, like Dr. Milton Kahn, who would examine you free and avoid all the expense and insurance nightmare, should be the one to make that critical interpretation.”

“Dr. Milton Kahn has pretty much examined all of me already,” Pearl said, getting angrier by the second.

“Pearl!”

“I’m only trying to make a point, Mom. If Milton Kahn thought the mole behind my ear was dangerous, he would have mentioned it to me long ago.”

“So you think he was concentrating on an out-of-the-way spot behind your right ear while you two were—”

“Mom! Damn it!” The plastic receiver was getting slippery in Pearl’s sweaty hand, as if it might slip from her grasp like a watermelon seed and go zipping across the room. She’d had about enough of this.

“So now impertinence and curse words are the answer? Let me tell you, dear, they are the answer to nothing. When your own mother calls and points out that you are in denial—”

“I don’t deny that I have a mole, Mom!”

“One you should regularly examine. If it
is
a mole.”

“I have to turn my head to the side and bend my ear forward even to see it. It hurts to do that.”

“Which is why you should have a doctor do the examining.”

“I have an appointment with a doctor,” Pearl lied. She’d had to call and cancel the appointment she’d made with the dermatologist who was not Milton Kahn. A murder investigation had gotten in the way.

There was surprise in Pearl’s mother’s voice. “Mrs. Kahn didn’t say her nephew, Dr. Milton—”

“He’s not the only dermatologist in New York!”

“For you, the only
free
one, dear. And one who cares for you already and will—”

Pearl cupped her hand over the earpiece, got up from the sofa, and placed the receiver in its cradle.

In the blessed silence she stood for a few minutes, waiting for the phone to ring. If her mother called back, as she sometimes did after such conversations, Pearl might apologize. Or she might not. Her mother was sticky and clever. She might trick Pearl into simply taking up the conversation where it had left off and getting angry all over again.

But her mother didn’t call and apparently wasn’t going to. Not this evening, anyway.

Pearl reverted to her plan to undress and shower before putting a Lean Cuisine in the microwave for dinner.

In the bathroom, while she was running the shower and waiting for the water to warm up, she stood before the medicine cabinet mirror, craned her neck painfully, and bent her right ear forward to examine the mole.

It appeared to be the same size as the last time she’d looked at it. Maybe a quarter of an inch in diameter. Maybe more.

She let her ear flop back in place and smiled. The mole wasn’t any larger. Seemed to be the same shape and color. She was sure.

Reasonably sure.

In the shower she realized she hadn’t checked to see if it had moved and had to laugh.

Briefly.

Terrible headache!

That was what woke Terri Gaddis.

Something was horribly wrong. Her head felt as if it were splitting wide open.

She attempted to swallow but couldn’t. And she was breathing with difficulty, through her nose. She explored with her tongue and found that her mouth was stuck firmly closed, as if her lips were taped.

Her consciousness was quickly returning. She became aware of another pain.

My ankles! My ankles are on fire!

Only then did she realize her eyes were still closed. They seemed dry. Stuck firm. She tried to wipe them with her hands, but couldn’t raise her arms. Couldn’t move them.

Then she realized they were taped or tied to her waist and thighs, in tight to her body.

Fear gave her strength. She forced her eyes wide open in alarm, and through her pain realized what was causing such agony in her head and ankles.

She was mystified and horrified to find that she was hanging upside down.

The hook in the ceiling!

Terri knew she was in her bathroom, dangling head down over her bathtub, hanging from the hook.

She glanced about frantically. The plastic shower curtain was closed, and though the light was on in the bathroom, she couldn’t see anything but her immediate porcelain, tile, and plastic surroundings. In a burst of panic she worked every muscle in her body, but nothing happened. Nothing!

Her struggles did cause her body to rotate slightly, and there were the stainless-steel faucet handles and spigot. The drain. Viewed so closely, she could see that the drain was starting to corrode and that a few of her hairs were caught on its cross braces from showers past.

How odd to notice something like that now.

Or is it? Is any of this real?

There was a slight sound on the other side of the plastic shower curtain, and she strained to see in that direction. Through the curtain she could make out the upside-down, shadowy shape of a man, growing larger, approaching.

Coming to help me, not to hurt me! Please!

When he was very near, the shadowy form on the curtain took on a paler, flesh-colored hue, and she realized the man was nude.

Kinky sex! That’s all this is! Kinky sex!

“Richard!”

She was aware that she’d made only a soft humming sound.

She tried again, screaming his name in her mind. Something warm was trickling along her body, tickling her armpits. She could smell it. Urine. Hers. The ammonia stench of her mindless fear.

Oh, Richard! Please!

The curtain rattled open on its rod, and all she could look at was the knife.